Grub’s up: how insects can help feed the world

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As the global population approaches 7.5 billion and newly affluent emerging middle classes switch to western-style, protein-rich diets, insects could provide an environmentally sustainable way to put food on people’s plates.

An infamous scene in Steven Spielberg’s 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom depicts a lavish but grotesque banquet at an Indian palace. For comedic effect, the female lead is seen recoiling from a series of gruesome dishes which include ‘snake surprise’, a soup containing eyeballs and ‘chilled monkey brains’. The scene caused controversy at the time for its unflattering – and wildly inaccurate – portrayal of Indian cuisine.

But 30 years on, one element of the meal, a platter laden with giant cockroach-like beetles, seems less far-fetched. Insects are now being seriously considered as a food source to help provide a booming global population in need of the proteins currently produced through environmentally destructive agriculture.

Insects already form part of the diet for up to a third of the world’s population. Market stalls selling fried locusts are a familiar sight in parts of Asia. Cooked mealworms taste like roasted nuts and fried crickets are reminiscent of popcorn – apparently. However, the big debate around insects as food is focused on how to transform them from novelty snacks or delicacies into mainstays in the food chain.

“Insects are a highly nutritious and healthy food source with high fat, protein, vitamin, fibre and mineral content,” says a United Nations report, which argues they are viable alternatives to existing staples such as chicken, pork, beef or fish.

While a rising global population clearly demands new ways of producing food – the UN expects the planet to be home to 9 billion humans by 2050 – so too does the economic development of emerging markets.

Breakneck growth in populous countries like India and China has led to the emergence of a huge new middle class, which is aspiring to the protein-rich consumption habits of its counterparts in Europe and North America.

But there remains, in the West at least, a cultural aversion to eating insects. Carefully executed public relations and marketing campaigns could overcome much of this, say the concept’s supporters. After all, they argue, we already consume honey, produced by bees, and many of us pay good money to eat crustaceans such as lobsters and prawns which are conspicuously insect-like with exoskeletons, multiple legs and antennae. Not so long ago the idea of eating raw fish was considered outlandish and disgusting in the West, where sushi restaurants now abound.

Less controversial and more economically viable – not to mention sustainable – is the use of insects in the production of animal feed.

A major constraint to expanding meat production to meet the needs of an increasingly ravenous world population is the high price of feeding livestock.

Animal feed, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations says, accounts for up to 70 per cent of the cost of producing meat. Traditional feed also means animals produce large quantities of manure, which creates environmental and health hazards.

This is where insects could make a real difference.

According to Dutch lobby group Venik, which campaigns for the greater use of insects as food, insects should be seen as “a missing link in a circular economy”. Certain types of insect could be bred on an industrial scale to supplement or replace traditional livestock feed.

Scientists are already considering the viability of using insects either to make a version of flour, acting as an alternative to soya from which other foods can be produced, or as a protein-rich animal feed for livestock and farmed fish.

Most of the research is focused on three types of insect, the mealworm, the black soldier fly and the common housefly. Because these species are easy to breed and produce nutritious grubs, they represent the best hopes for an economical way to introduce insects into food production.

Researchers say soldier flies can be grown on manure, harnessing a potential health hazard as a resource and rendering it less harmful. What is more, the soldier fly’s pupae make viable replacements for soya meal or maize in poultry diets. The black soldier fly prepupae, meanwhile, contains more than 40 per cent protein and 35 per cent fat. This makes it a potentially nutritious meal for chickens, pigs and fish, according to the FAO.

The process also scores well on sustainability. Humans consume insect-fed livestock, which in turn generate a certain amount of organic waste. That waste can then be used to feed more insects and the cycle starts again.

Currently, insects are being bred, harvested and marketed on an industrial scale for mass consumption, principally as pet food. Many of the companies involved make no secret of their ambitions eventually to produce for farm animals and human consumption.

The International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF) is a Brussels-based trade association founded in 2013 to represent insect breeders. Chinese group HaoCheng Mealworms Inc exports 200 tons of dried mealworms each year to North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. In Europe, the trade is currently dominated by Dutch companies such as Kreca, Protix and Jagran, many of which backed the formation of the IPIFF to lobby for legislation that would allow development of a real insect food industry.

So western cultural aversions aside, adoption of insects should be a straightforward choice for agriculture then, right?

Not quite.

Bridget Nicholls, founder and organiser of insect-focused cultural event Pestival, which seeks to raise awareness of the importance and potential of insects, points out that a number of barriers remain in place that prevent their wholesale adoption as a staple food for people or livestock.

“There’s no reason we couldn’t be eating it but at the moment there are issues with cost and legislation,” she says.

“If you’re starting to look at protein, the issue is how do you freeze-dry it at the right temperature so you can store it without it decreasing in protein value? When they are a grub or a pupa they have a high level of protein. As they get bigger and older they lose that. Bodies like the FAO have launched big campaigns to try and figure that out but it all costs a lot of money.”

A second barrier to change, Nicholls points out, is a lack of legislation relevant to the new processes that would be involved.

“Because it’s a new field the legislation hasn’t caught up yet in Europe,” she says.

“Even though insects are eaten by wild animals all the time, as soon as you start farming them they become livestock and then they have rights. They become the equivalent of pigs and chickens and cows. It’s about how they’re bred and whether they experience pain.”

The move towards legislating in Europe has started to gather momentum, following extensive research by the FAO and pressure from lobby groups. IPIFF launched a campaign this year to push for European legislation to be adapted to allow insect products as a source of animal proteins for food consumption and animal feed.

“Our planet faces huge challenges because of the growing population and increasing competition for scarce resources and we believe that insects are part of the solution,” IPIFF president Antoine Hubert said.

Entomophagy

Pronunciation: [en-tuh-mof-uh-jee]

The practice of eating insects, especially by people.

The word ‘entomophagy’ derives from the Greek term entomos, or entomon, meaning, “insect(ed)”, literally meaning “cut in two”, referring to an insect’s segmented body, and phagein, “to eat”.

To the entomophagist pioneers, these issues are mere bumps in the road rather than serious barriers to insects becoming an integral part of the food production cycle.

Attitudes, it seems, are changing towards greater acceptance of insects as food, partly because of awareness of the environmental impact of conventional livestock farming. Global coffee chain Starbucks recently suffered a PR crisis when it emerged it was using insect extract as a colouring for some of its drinks, not because of people’s squeamishness, but because the company’s vegan and vegetarian customers resented being duped into consuming an animal product.

Indeed, a handful of products are already being prepared for market, including ‘Chirps’ (as opposed to chips) produced by the company Six Foods – slogan: “eat what bugs you“ – and made “with a mix of wholesome beans, corn, peas, chia seeds and cricket flour”. Fitness fanatics and body builders also have ‘Bug Muscle’ to look forward to, soon to be available in health food outlets alongside other, more conventional, protein supplements. Such novelty products, Nicholls explains, could be an image of the future. “What they are looking at with the fats and protein in insects is it’s in a powdered form. It’ll probably end up as a kind of soya replacement,” she says.

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